Over the better part of two decades as an NFL head coach, Sean Payton has seen and done it all.
Or at least most of it.
He won a Super Bowl in 2009, a first for New Orleans. He got suspended an entire season for his role in the Bounty Gate scandal, a first for any NFL coach.
He was on the wrong side of the Minneapolis Miracle in 2018 and the worst pass interference call in league history a year later.
He’s scored a ton of points, won a ton of games and spent 14 years with a Hall of Fame quarterback in Drew Brees.
It all goes together for the Broncos head coach, now entering the second year of his second head coaching act.
It all also helps explain one peculiar blank spot on his resume: He’s never drafted a quarterback higher than the third round. Or worked with a rookie expected to produce in any major way.
Payton’s stalked the sideline as an NFL head coach in 258 regular-season games, won 62% of them and started a rookie quarterback exactly once. The honor goes to Ian Book, the fourth-rounder out of Notre Dame. The date: Week 16 of the 2021 season, the coach’s first without Brees and final in New Orleans before taking 2022 off.
All of which leads to Thursday night, when the Broncos will decide whether to go all-in on finding a quarterback early in the draft, wait until the later rounds, roll with Jarrett Stidham or try to engineer a surprise trade for a veteran.
If they do take a quarterback early, it will represent a new frontier for the coach and for the franchise and most certainly will be a whirlwind for whatever rookie is headlong into Payton’s playbook by the time the weekend arrives. Short-term progress and long-term success, however, will be reliant on much more than moving up in the draft or finding consensus on a player to pick.
The short list
The list of quarterbacks drafted by Payton can be counted on one hand with room to spare.
The four: Sean Canfield in the seventh round in 2010, Garrett Grayson in the third round in 2015, Tommy Stevens in the seventh round in 2020 and then Book in the fourth in 2021.
Except Stevens never actually played quarterback for the Saints.
He was picked with a Taysom Hill-esque role in mind in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Quickly, though, opt-outs and injuries meant he’d moved to tight end by the time training camp started.
“I got one quarterback meeting,” he told The Post recently with a laugh. “That’s all I got. And I didn’t say anything.”
The fact that he spent the spring learning the playbook via Zoom with Jameis Winston and now-Broncos offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi, though, puts him closer to the rookie quarterback experience under Payton than most have been.
Stevens saw the shot this season of Payton’s play sheet on national television and thought, “that looks familiar.”
When you first dive into the verbiage after getting drafted, it’s daunting, especially for players coming from signal-based, simplified college offenses.
“It’s a little scary at first, at least it was for me, just seeing all these (freaking) words,” he said. “And then you’ve got Drew, who didn’t even wear a wristband. That was Drew’s last year and I remember thinking Drew was made in a lab. It’s obviously Drew Brees, but it was still insane to me how he’d mastered that offense.
“So that being said, there was no sense of urgency to get anybody ready to play.”
Brees was physically limited by then compared to the height of his powers, but he had “whatever comes beyond mastery” of the system, Stevens said.
That’s why he wonders what a Payton offense with a rookie quarterback might look like.
“It’ll be interesting to see, because I would imagine that it would need to be brought down a notch for a guy that’s fresh out of college,” said Stevens, now a quarterback for the Calgary Stampeders in the Canadian Football League. “Not to say that there’s not guys that can do it. There’s plenty of guys – I’ve been down here (in Jacksonville, Florida) training and Caleb Williams has been down here. (Florida State’s) Jordan Travis. These kids are getting smarter and smarter every year and they’re getting more and more pro-ready.
“But it will just be different starting from the bottom with a new face, a new mind and whether or not he’s willing to adapt to that and kind of re-install the building blocks from which they had success in New Orleans.
“I’m just as intrigued as everyone else is to see how and what they end up doing.”
The coach
Payton, however, is not going to sit around and wait for a young quarterback to learn at his own pace.
His vetting process is part get-to-know-ya, but mostly stress testing. Send as much information as you can as close to meeting a prospect as possible and see if there’s a limit to what he learns.
“Where’s the breaking point? Is there one?” Payton said earlier this offseason.
It’s on Payton, general manager George Paton and the rest of the Broncos’ coaching staff and scouting department to determine if there’s somebody out there who can handle that.
Another prerequisite, according to former Payton quarterback Luke McCown: “Some thick skin.”
Hardly any explanation is necessary given Payton’s exacting standards and the gameday fire that led him to light up veteran Russell Wilson on the sideline multiple times in the 2023 season.
“He’s got to have thick skin and then he’s going to have a personality that loves, loves, loves ball like Sean does,” McCown said. “That wants to stay up at night thinking about routes and concepts and personnel groupings so they can really partner their thought processes and be joined at the hip.”
Payton wants a player who can execute the system as designed and make the extra play when necessary. He wants somebody flexible enough to implement the idea he comes up with on the fly late in the week, by candlelight and the glow of the film at 1 a.m. Saturday.
He wants somebody who will do it his way but is also equipped to lead a locker room of grown men and serve as the face of a franchise.
“He wants the vocal, grab the reins and take ownership of the offense by his quarterback,” McCown said. “And I don’t think that he’s opposed to it being a rookie, per se. He wants you to display some ownership of it and he’s going to give you the tools to do it, whether it’s plays in a no-huddle or audibles or protections or whatever.
“He’s going to give you the tools to do it, so he wants you to not be afraid of that authority but to take ownership of it and to own it.”
The exception?
Payton’s mostly found that in older players during his tenure as a head coach.
Brees, obviously, is the dominant example.
When Payton got hired in New Orleans, the Saints held the No. 2 pick.
He could have had his pick of Texas’ Vince Young, USC’s Matt Leinart or Vanderbilt’s Jay Cutler.
Instead, a few weeks before the draft they landed Brees, who had already been a Pro Bowler in San Diego but also had major durability questions after a shoulder injury.
The first-year head coach got Brees at 27 instead of a rookie. Young went No. 3, Leinart No. 10 and Cutler one pick later to the Broncos.
Denver hasn’t taken a quarterback that high since. Payton never has. In fact, he only had one other top-10 pick during his time in New Orleans (No. 7 in 2008) and only picked No. 12 or higher three times.
The closest he came to another quarterback in that range was a plan to draft Patrick Mahomes No. 11 in 2017 that Kansas City foiled by trading up from No. 28 to No. 10.
Perhaps 2024 is the moment he actually starts down an uncharted path.
“We have all of the tape, and then you are gathering as much information as you can,” he said. “You’re gathering all the metrics and all the stuff you can measure. Then you’re gathering the interactions, personalities and learning, which is very important. All of that so you can make the best decision relative to how you grade them.
“Historically speaking, you would say it’s not a perfect science.”
Hardly. The 2021 draft stands as the most recent example. Five quarterbacks went in the top 15. Three years later, only Trevor Lawrence is a starter or even with his original team. Chicago and New England picked Justin Fields and Mac Jones at Nos. 11 and 15, respectively, and now pick No. 1 and No. 3 and could again swing big on a rookie quarterback.
The Broncos all along have expressed confidence in their process.
“We spend as much time as we can with these players,” Paton said. “We give them the test in the offseason, we watch them in the Senior Bowl and we watch them in the fall. You try to project. We fly them in, and we spend as many hours with these quarterbacks as we have with any other player. Nothing is definite, but you try to project what they will be like. Obviously, the tape tells you one thing and then the meetings, the testing, getting them around your building and the fit — you’re never 100% certain, but you try to project.
“You play the odds as much as you can, and you do that by getting around these players as much as possible.”
The landing spot
Of course, success or failure for a young quarterback only starts with his own ability and growth track.
“I think there’s more attention being paid now to maybe more so the environment than the actual quarterback,” NFL Network analyst Daniel Jeremiah said last week. “And knowing how to set the table for when you do take the quarterback, that he can be successful. …
“That seems to be a conversation I have a lot with teams around the league is, okay, A, do we take him? Then do we put him out there right away? Do we have the infrastructure for him to survive and be successful? That seems to be a little bit more of the focus.”
A young quarterback needs the three Ps: A play-caller, protection and playmakers.
In Jeremiah’s estimate, Minnesota provides the best set of all three. He said Wednesday that if quarterbacks and agents were given truth serum, they’d all say they wanted to play for coach Kevin O’Connell, behind left tackle Christian Darrisaw and throw the ball to receivers Justin Jefferson and Jordan Addison and tight end T.J. Hockenson.
How about the Broncos? Where do they rank?
“It’s not the Vikings, but look, I think it’s set up to be functional,” Jeremiah said. “You look at having the offensive mind/play caller there with Sean and Lombardi having been together forever. Those guys know what they’re doing. So you’ve got that taken care of. I think the offensive line’s in decent shape. So you start there. To me, they don’t have premier, premier weapons, but they’ve got some interesting guys. …
“To me it’s like, let’s not be in a situation where we’re throwing him out there and he’s got no chance. I don’t think that’s the case in Denver. I think you get him out there, you’ve got a chance for your quarterback to be functional.”
Bottom line: The Broncos may not be primed like Houston was a year ago when it landed C.J. Stroud or in as good a position as Minnesota and Chicago — each armed with more weapons and two first-round picks apiece — this year. But with Payton and a mostly veteran offensive line, the Broncos are better off than, say, Carolina was a year ago when it drafted Bryce Young No. 1 overall and then watched him swim upstream all season.
So, who’s up for the challenge?
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